Germans get militant with mother tongue

LANGUAGE preservationists in Germany are planning a series of street marches and poster campaigns against the onslaught of English words and phrases swamping the mother tongue. The language of Goethe and Schiller is rapidly being eclipsed with the avalanche of foreign words, so much so that the newspeak in Germany even has a name: Denglish.

Last week in Mannheim 500 academics, scientists, politicians, journalists and publicists attended the annual conference of the Institute for the German Language to discuss the theme: "Current Lexical Change - New and Foreign in the German Vocabulary."

The participants from a country that never met a tongue twister it didn't like - Strassenbahnhaltestelle for tram stop or Lohnsteuer bescheinigung for tax document - heard experts reveal that 40% of new words in the last decade incorporated into German were English and 20% of current advertisements incorporate German and English together.

Examples included: "Last minute Urlaub" - last minute holiday; and an extraordinary tome from Jil Sander, the German fashion designer who, in a piece about herself, wrote: "Mein Leben ist eine giving story. Ich habe verstanden, dass man contemporary sein muss, das future Denken haben muss." A right mischling - mixture - which infuriates the purists to apoplexy.

This unstoppable flood of McCulturisms prompted the formation three years ago of the Association for the Preservation of the German Language, the Animal Liberation Front of the spoken word. While consensus among the conference organisers at the end of the event was that such cultural incursions are common, benign and widely unavoidable, the hardliners of the preservers advocate much stronger tactics.

They are now regular fixtures at popular open-air street markets in places like Muenster and Munich where they hawk pamphlets and literature warning of the destructive lingo not so much seeping in as storming into everyday usage. Their membership figures suggest they have tapped into some popular concerns; with 10,000 members aged 13- 93 it is one of the fastest growing societies in Germany.

"We have hit a nerve," said association spokeswoman Ilona Waldera. "The people have recognised that their cultural identity is at stake because every person thinks and dreams in their mother tongue." Their main concern is that words absorbed into German fundamentally alter the so-called "deep code" of the language, a theory that most linguists now no longer subscribe to.

Deep-code theories aside the association is now going to war against those companies that "bastardise" German, most visibly through advertising. They are planning a poster campaign against, among others, Deutsche Telekom which uses phrases like "City Call' and "Moonshine Tariff" in its promotions.

"These are superfluous, avoidable anglicisms and we want to eradicate them," added Frau Waldera. Other corporate offenders include the H&M clothing company which produces its advertisements for tank tops with exactly that name in a single sentence. The Berlin municipal authorities extol the virtues of their dustmen and road sweepers in a series of ads playing on English words. One is "Drei Wetter Tough" for three beefy guys with their brooms at the ready.

Another ad goes: "We Kehr for you" - Kehr being part of the German verb 'to sweep.'

Cosima Reif, creative director of the Vienna based Demner, Merlicek and Bergmann advertising agency, said: "English is, quite simply, the most appropriate language for a cosmopolitan marketing strategy. German? Not if you want to build up a brand name. If I want to claim a product has cosmopolitan flair then it is English every time." Sebastian Turner, manager of the Berlin advertising agency Scholz and Friends - prime usage of Denglish - agreed, saying: "Disgruntled Germans should take a look in the mirror. Advertising is a very democratic institution. If people buy products with English in the advertising of them then they really have no grounds for complaint.

"Certainly English is far, far more effective as a marketing tool."

Newspaper readers even have to put up with English words in headlines. Both Bild and BZ, two of the biggest selling daily papers, used the word "sorry" four times on the same day in football reports last year and the quality newspaper Die Welt runs a full page each day in Berlin about the new capital - all in English.

Germans get to choose which definite article to put before an English word but they just cannot get Germanic substitutes for so many business terms. So das Marketing, der Call Centre, der computer and der New Berlin are just a few of the thousands of Denglish terms set to stay.

Huge corporations such as Daimler, Siemens, Thyssen and Bosch conduct most of their business meetings in English, while teachers the length and breadth of Germany are making money from smaller firms and individuals eager to learn the lingo of Groessbritannien. "The demand is quite astonishing," said Pamela Jones-Bieroegel, a 44-year- old English teacher living in north-Rhine Westphalia, the country's industrial heartland.

"The feeling is that if you haven't got English then you simply don't have a chance in the modern marketplace. It is also a very trendy thing among Germans to say that they speak, or are learning to speak, English.

"Parents are very conscious that German is not the language of the future. Consequently I get a lot of pupils who come for extra tuition because their mothers and fathers want to be certain that if they fail at everything else, they will have an English qualification under their belts."

Those in attendance at the Current Lexical Change conference are not as outraged as those in the ranks of the hardline preservationists. Deter Herberg of the Institute for the German Language said: "We scientists have to be cold blooded about these things. Change happens in language all the time."

He pointed out that in the last century Germans didn't have a "nase" - nose on their faces. They had "gesichtserker" which literally means bay-window. He doesn't believe most Germans would swap their Latin-rooted hooters for new bay windows any time bald - sorry, soon.

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